The Fathering Land Read online

  The new peoples of this world, whom the original natives had called demons, we Icarans now referred to as "the new races." My seven wives were all members of those races: two succubi, a kappa, a harpy, a centaur, an olbytla, and a giant, in the order in which they bonded with me. Montana was the giant. My pixie sons had been the result of a fly-by sexual assault by the aforementioned pixie rapist, Kaityline. I regretted the circumstances of their conception, but I wouldn't have changed it if I could: I loved my boys with a deep, abiding paternal love I hadn't known I possessed.

  Except for Ava, my harpy wife, all my wives were currently with child, all sons; and the only reason Ava wasn't was because she couldn't get pregnant again until after Isaiah was born. As for me, I was able to keep them all happy because I was hyperspermic and hypersexual, and I loved them all and tried to treat them equally. That was our First Law in Icarus Township: we were humans first, not olbytla, succubus, harpy, terran, kappa, pooka, or whatever. No one was to be called demon, the old term for the new races, ever. We were friends, neighbors, and countrymen. Those unable to handle that were politely asked to leave. There hadn't been many so far.

  A distinct thump brought me back to the present, followed by a high, ringing chime as the crack in Isaiah's egg extended. Then there was a glass-like shattering sound as a tiny fist punched through the weakened shell, accompanied by a frustrated "Cheep!" that sounded like a curse. The shell fell into three large pieces.

  "He's definitely your son," Ava noted dryly, as she stepped forward to receive him.

  "Isaiah!" "Ike!" "Izzy!" "I-Ball!" chorused the Dixies. That's what we called my pixie sons, for... indelicate reasons. They let out a lusty cheer and yelled "Welcome home!" in unison as his mother picked him up. Isaiah looked around curiously and started cheeping, first sounding a bit confused, and then irritated.

  "Oh my gosh, he's starving to death!" cried purple-haired Dionysus, clapping tiny hands to a violet-eyed face.

  "Dear me!" Apollo said, wide-eyed, "I do believe he's cursing us like a sailor for not being ready!"

  "Don't worry, little guy!" bawled fire-haired Chaos, who was maybe a quarter of Isaiah's size on a good day. "We're ready for ya! We brought meat!"

  "Raw meat!" assured Gration.

  "Just the way I like it," purred vampire-toothed Bellerophon.

  "Kyoop! Herm! Bring over that squirrel! The small one!" Filotus commanded.

  Without arguing (to my amazement), Hermes and Eros—whom the other boys preferred to call Kyoop or Cupid, because Eros sounded too much like Little Magic's real name, Eos, and even more because Cupid rhymed with Stupid, which he wasn't—struggled over with a small skinned and gutted squirrel that looked more like a rat, if you ask me. They heaved it toward Ava, and our baby snatched it out of the air with a satisfied coo. While his fascinated mother cradled him in the crook of her left arm and held the squirrel in her right hand, he ripped into the meat like the predator he was.

  I have no idea why the aeronautics engineers and pilots who Stepped Through became harpies, but I suspected it was the universe's idea of a joke. Now they could fly without machines.

  Little Isaiah was among the third generation of his race. Like all fledglings, he looked a little ridiculous and ragged, because his down was patchy and his pinions hadn't grown in. Like all baby harpies, his down was white, but he had cottony blonde head-hair with a strawberry tint, similar to mine as a child, rather than his mother's gray-black. His beak was stubby and flexible, like his mom's. He looked pretty much like you'd expect a bird-human hybrid to appear; he had normal arms, hands, and legs, as well as surprisingly large wings and a barrel chest, and his feet ended in scaly talons, just like his mom's. He was harpy through and through, but he was special—and not just because he was ours.

  He was special because unlike any other harpy in the world, he was male.

  My tenth son made short work of the tree-rat, and his mother set aside its remains before she wiped his face clean. He cheeped happily and leaned into his mother's downy breasts, from which he would nurse as a supplement to his carnivorous diet.

  "Lift him up so we can all see, Ava darling," I said, as I stepped forward and rubbed him on the head. Isaiah stretched under my hand like a happy cat.

  When she did as I asked, I pointed to a strategically important area of his body and said, "See there, Slinky? A boy, just like I said." My assertion that Ike would be male, when no male dimensional traveler had ever been born in the 24 years since the Day of Ruin, had been a sore point of contention between us a while back. Very sore for me, as she slapped the hell out of me and "how dared me" for getting the other girls' hopes up.

  My First Paramour, the succubus who had captured me shortly after the Dawn Goddess had repaired my immature body several months before, rolled her eyes. "You're never going to let me live that down, are you, Toby?"

  "No. No, I am not." I looked at Ava and asked, "May I?" and when she nodded, smiling, I took my son into my arms. I know how to hold a full-sized baby, though all my other sons weren't much bigger than the length of my hand when they were born; I often babysat as a teen. I was good at it.

  I looked at Isaiah, and he looked at me, and I noticed that he had the same green eyes that I had, that I'd gotten from my birth father, and that I had also given to my lost son, little Icarus. "Hello, Isaiah Fell Junior," I said, and leaned forward, smiling happily, until his little eyes crossed as they tried to focus on mine. Then he bit me on the nose. That beak was sharper than it looked. "Ow!" I shouted, but luckily didn't drop him. "I'm your father, not your food!" Slinky and her daughter Jenna, my Second Paramour, practically fell to the floor, they laughed so hard.

  "Laugh it up, ladies! No dinner for you two!" I mock-snarled. "Dinner" was the cocktail of enzymes they, um, drank from me in order to survive.

  Jenna smirked. "Yeah, like you'd deprive yourself of that."

  I rolled my eyes. They were right, but why let them know that? I snapped my fingers at Eros. "More food for your baby brother. Something smaller."

  The little white-haired, yellow-eyed Dixie handed me a mouse. Kyoop was wearing a tiny version of one of the blue-and-gold uniforms the Alfas we'd wrested the Township from had worn, no doubt sewn by one of the Mamas he'd sweet-talked, or maybe by one of his pixie conquests. It looked good on him, and I realized he was all of a foot tall now, having grown quite a bit in the past few months. As I dangled the mouse above Ike, who voiced a high-pitched hawkish screech and snatched it out of my hand with his beak, Kyoop buzzed closer to my ear and said something in a low voice.

  I couldn't hear it over the crunching of mouse bones and Ike's delighted cooing, so I had him repeat it a bit louder. He kept his voice down, but this time I made it out: "Isn't she the most beautiful girl in the world, Dad?"

  "Mama Ava? Of course. Your Mamas are all the most beautiful girls in the world."

  "No, no! Her!" I followed his enraptured gaze to Ike's nanny. "Sabranna," he breathed ecstatically. "She's so soft, and she tastes so good..."

  "Oh, so you're the father, are you? She really is quite beautiful." I grinned. "Good for you."

  "She was my first," he admitted, bouncing happily on my shoulder. "I found her hiding in the kitchen in the Castle, the day after the Battle. I didn't even know those witches had pixies working for them, but they captured her one day when she was out hunting. I ran into her sneaking out of a cabinet, and she pounced on me when she saw I was rockin' a boner!" Kyoop was always 'rockin' a boner,' to use the odd terminology he'd literally inherited from his birth mother. He was born with a boner. Literally. "We did it on the window sill in a sunbeam for hours. You wouldn't believe the kinds of things she can do with her—"

  "Too much information," I grumbled. "So she pounced on you, did she? Did she at least ask first?" I peered at my son, whose yellow eyes looked confused for a moment.

  "Uhhhh... no, not really," he admitted. "Is that not okay? Like, you taught us never to force ourselves on anyone, especially after that time with Mama
Montana's boobs." He and his brothers, like Icarus, had been using them as trampolines. "But I was the first boy she ever saw, so I guess she got all hot and bothered, and she kinda forced herself on me... a poor, inexperienced kid and all..." He looked a bit traumatized, but I knew he was faking, because he immediately perked up. "But I loved it! It was really fun! Then she got me to borrow some embroidery thread from Mama Coulter's sewing kit, so I could—"

  "Enough!" I face-palmed. I knew my sons were trying to repopulate the Earth all on their own, but I didn't want to hear about it. Especially since they were all little perverts. Gration, the largest of them at almost a foot and a half tall now, seemed more interested in larger women than in pixies. He'd propositioned all seven of the Mamas before I told him in no uncertain terms that they were mine. He'd even managed to bag a couple of olbytla lovers, though as far as I knew he hadn't impregnated them. Yet.

  Now, why a woman just over a yard tall would even pursue a sexual relationship with a man half her height, however pretty and heroically proportioned for his size, I didn't understand. He did have this lazy, sleepy-eyed way of delivering his lines that apparently caused them to tingle in all the right places. And from what he'd tried to tell me before I covered my ears and started singing "La la la!", he was very talented at "nursing," that there were certain things a tiny man could do for a much larger woman that didn't involve wedding tackle, and that he had invented a technique that had something to do with his wings...

  Kyoop elbowed me in the ear. "So hey, Dad, since I have white hair, and Sabbie has black hair, do you think our Icarus will have striped black-and-white hair? Huh? Huh? That would be cool, right?"

  "That's not how it works, I don't think. Besides, do you really want your son to be called 'Skunkhead' all his—" And then what he'd said caught up with me. In a choked voice, I repeated, "Icarus?"

  Kyoop said cheerfully, "Sabbie and I have already decided to name him after brother Icky, Dad. All us Dixies are going to name our firstborn sons after him. We know it'll be a lot of Icari, but we're going to number them by birth order, starting with II. I think my Icky will be first, since we hadn't even been to the pixie hive yet when I bred Sabbie." He looked at me, sudden concern on his face. "That's okay, right? To name him Icarus?"

  I was barely able to say, through my suddenly constricted throat, "Yes. Right."

  "Woohoo!"

  Feeling a little stunned, I stood there holding my tenth son as Kyoop went to confer with his brothers, dandling Isaiah as he faded off to his contented first sleep, his little belly rounded and full. After I'd regained my composure, I handed him back to his mother, congratulated her profusely, and promised her I'd see her later that night. Now that Isaiah had been born, I could "breed" her again, as Kyoop had so crudely put it.

  Then I left the keep and took a long walk through Icarus Township, once known as Scarborough Faire, my thoughts unsettled.

  It didn't help that everywhere I looked, I saw pregnant women. One of the benefits of citizenship was the opportunity to be impregnated, by yours truly or by the Dixies, with a son. I still wasn't reconciled to my new role as a breeding stud, though I enjoyed the benefits. I knew it was important, but still, I wanted to be known for something more substantial than literally fathering a new nation. For the moment, we were making progress toward expanding our settlement, building protective structures, establishing farms, and welcoming in new members almost daily as word spread... but I spent most of my days fornicating with women, and not just my wives.

  Though it had its moments, it wasn't as erotic or exotic as it sounds. It was hard work, actually. I was hoping another Father would show up soon, so I could start solidifying my plans to expand our new nation. And make no mistake: that was what I was determined it would become.

  The Dawn Goddess, my first love Aurora, had assured me that all my children would be boys—the first among the new races, at least in the former Confederate States of America, and likely in all the Americas. Like my far-flung brethren, I had become a Y-Chromosome Repository on the disastrous Day of Ruin, 24 new-years ago. All the Y-Chromosomes that had been stripped from the invaders of the U.S.A. timeline that had merged with my home timeline had been somehow stored in the genetic code of me and the other Y-Chromosome Repositories, fortunately without any deleterious effects — except for one, in my case.

  Aurora was looking far and wide for one or two or ten additional Repositories to take over some of my fathering duties, but apparently we were few and far between. I wondered if they, like I, had been under a semi-mystical geas that had prevented them from undergoing puberty until they reached full adulthood. It had hit me like a hammer when it finally came, which had contributed to my exile from my home village of Hamiltown three months ago as the sudden flood of hormones caused me to become rather... aggressive.

  One day, I would return to Hamiltown and drag it back into the 21st century, followed by the rest of Tejas.

  One of the slight bunny-like sylvies, who called herself Fiver, smiled at me coyly as she passed, carrying a folded basket of clothing. Contrary to appearances, the doe was quite the wolf in bed, and like all pookas, was a knockout who would easily have been fashion-model beautiful in pre-Ruin society—even with the bunny ears, fur, and suggestive little cottontail (which she, like her sisters, had tailored her clothing to expose and emphasize). Probably especially with all that, if I understood some of the popular entertainment back then. She was also enormously pregnant, though that hadn't kept her from cornering me in one of the storage buildings and having her way with me last week.

  It certainly was a tough life.

  Of all the pregnant women in Icarus, the sylvies were the furthest along at the moment. Like the leporids they were modeled after, they had a rather brief gestational period, a bit over two months, which seemed ridiculously short for any large human race. Some might deliver as early as next week. The wolfin had four-month pregnancies. I had been matter-of-factly informed that most pookas had litters of two to four children, which still left me wide-eyed whenever I thought about it, like now. I had been further informed that it was rare for more than one in a litter to survive to adulthood, about three years (!), but that was damn sure going to change in this nation.

  Single births were the norm among most of the other new races, who had pregnancies closer to the year-long human gestational period. Thank the Goddess. But on the other hand, pookas made good fighters, even the sylvies, if properly trained.

  I glanced up at the sky, to see the sun burning yellow through high cirrus overhead. It still amazed me to know that the year had once been a staggering 52 weeks long. Now it was 39 weeks, right at 272 days. With the arrival of mid-September, we were on the verge of autumn.

  And now that it was noon, I had a date with a stone fox.

  Chapter Two

  Petra (formerly Peter) Canteris had arrived with her unit a bit over two weeks before, "on 29 June AR 24," as she had crisply reminded me more than once, and they had immediately pledged allegiance to me, my Seven Paramours, and Icarus Township. Petra was desperate for a son before she died, so as to carry on her family name, which I'd agreed to. She'd Stepped Through as a black man in her mid-forties, the commander of a mobile artillery group. Her current group comprised a total of 27 soldiers, including a dozen originals and their descendants. The botched passage had converted her entire unit to fox-pooka of various types: stone, kit, arctic, red, gray, swift, even a couple of adorable, huge-eared fennecs. My son Apollo was not-so-secretly pining for one of those, a little white second-gen called Fennel not much bigger than he was. I had decided to leave her to him, since she was much too small for me.

  There were ways to impregnate the small races that didn't involve penetration, or I wouldn't have pixie sons. But I didn't like them.

  The Vixens, as they called themselves, had trekked here from their original base in the Wachita Mountains of Indiahoma when they heard about us. Word had travelled fast about "the boymaker," it seemed. This would be Petra's se
cond time in my bed, and I was obliged to go through her entire Second Squad in the next few days; First Squad had already been taken care of. The Vixens had gotten special treatment because Petra had brought with her the design for a trebuchet that she'd traded to us for citizenship and priority treatment. I knew that there would come a day when we would need catapults, and my son Little Magic had already suggested several significant improvements.

  Petra herself was a stone fox-pooka, not much smaller than a wolfin; while rare, the African foxes were among the largest and longest-lived of their kind. She had immediately applied for my fathering services and had not been patient about it. I already knew stonies were aggressive, so that didn't bother me—and besides, something about her aroused me like no other woman since my Paramours. She was muscular, tall for a vixen, devastatingly attractive despite her distinct muzzle, and well-padded in all the appropriate places. She was sleek and fun to handle, I'd learned, but she was also fond of biting. Not my first experience with that, as some ladies enjoyed it, but she had teeth like needles.